VOICE Newsletter January 2006 Released

OS/2 13 Comments
The VOICE newsletter for OS/2 and eComStation has returned. The January issue can be found here, and it contains articles on NVU, DFSee, a report on WarpStock Europe 2005, and much more. "Finally! Some may have thought that the newsletter had gone the way of all flesh. Indeed, the revision has taken a while and we skipped some issues. This step was neccessary to be able to focus on our work, or it would have taken even longer. At this point, I would like to thank all the persons involved, especially Holger Manthey for many ideas, creating images, and his patience."
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The Reality of Advocacy

  Submitted by Jono Bacon Open Source 14 Comments
"Advocacy is a funny old game. Although it seems a loose and inexact science, developing as an advocate demands a range of communicative, philosophical and technical skills. Advocacy is not just about the message, but it is about the tone, colour and dynamics of the communication. As a professional advocate of Open Source, I get email asking about how to advocate efficiently and with a high degree of success."
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Red Hat No. 1 Local Stock

  Submitted by anonymous Red Hat 9 Comments
The stock shot up like a weed on a sunny spring day. Red Hat shares rose 104 percent, making it the top gainer among 28 public companies based in the region. It highlights an adage of business: performance pays. Red Hat, after bolstering its executive ranks and making other tweaks, has reported solid sales and profit growth. In the most recent quarter, which ended Nov. 30, it beat analysts' expectations for both.
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Google AdSense Trojan

  Submitted by BCM Google 6 Comments
A new, deceptive trojan horse program has surfaced. The program is engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. Since the Trojan Horse makes the deceptive ads look like normal Google ads, the program was nearly impossible to detect by the general public. However, Raoul Bangera, discovered the bogus program and contacted the Google AdSense team. Bangera emailed the team a number of cases, including various screenshots, log files of an infected computer and system files as proof. The AdSense team validated the news saying, “We can confirm from the screenshots that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.”
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Will Vista Say No to Old DVD Drives?

Windows 31 Comments
I recently saw a post on Neowin which said that Vista will no longer allow the use of region-free DVD drives for movie playback; I found this strange considering in some nations region-coding DVDs is illegal as it goes against consumer rights. Neowin also links against an MS developers blog, where he talks about MS lacking any region-free drives to test legacy code on, and this may lead to lack of support for those drives. So where does this leave consumers who have region-free drives? Well you'll be able to still use DVD-data discs you just wont be able to play encrypted/region-coded DVDs anymore.
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JNode 0.2.2 Released

  Submitted by Martin Husted Hartvig OS News 6 Comments
The JNode Project has released version 0.2.2 of their OS. This release offers improvements in the classpath runtime library and numberous GUI improvements; the changelog details the rest of the improvements in this release of JNode.
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Iron Python 1.0 Beta 1 Released

  Submitted by jayson.knight General Development 6 Comments
Iron Python 1.0 Beta 1 has been released, this build includes many bug fixes for issues reported to the team by the community, and also has many changes which give it better compatibility with CPython 2.4. From the site: "With this build we've addressed the majority of major design issues for a 1.0 final. We're not sure that you'll agree with all of our answers, so pick it up and let us know what you think".
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Methodology Design: the Way We Do Things Around Here

General Development 1 Comment
When people talk about "improving" software methodology, they rarely talk about tradeoffs. Requirements freeze, for example, runs the risk of delivering exactly what the customer asked for - and not what he needs. Concrete, detailed estimates take a considerable amount of time to create, and that's time that could be spent writing code or executing tests. M. Heusser discusses the tradeoffs and choices you'll have to make when the goal is improving (or even initially developing) your methodology.
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KDE 4 To Support OS X Dashboard Widgets

  Submitted by KDE User KDE 72 Comments
Zack Rusin of KDE has said KDE4 will have full support for widgets from OS X's Dashboard. "I finally got most the implementation of the HTML Canvas element for KHTML finished. It's in the kdelibs-js branch in SVN. After George/Maks merge their other changes we'll merge it to HEAD. I'm planning to add full OSX Dashboard compatibility layer for Plasma (hence why I've spent most of the day yesterday on implementing the Canvas element)."
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Could Genesi Be the Solution for Hyperion’s Problems?

Amiga & AROS 50 Comments
There is kind of a stir in the Amiga community. As Hyperion employees explained in an IRC chat, Hyperion suffers from a lack of hardware for the development (and thus sales) of AmigaOS4. However, what about Genesi? Genesi is the company behind the ODW, a PPC workstation that could potentially be the solution to Hyperion's lack-of-hardware problems. However, friction between the two companies is preventing them from coming to an agreement. More from the community here, and here. My take: I find this a rather silly situation. It is quite clear that Genesi is one of the few companies capable of offering a steady flow of PPC hardware for the AmigaOS, yet things in the past are preventing a financially interesting cooperation. And who suffer? Exactly-- Amiga fans.
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KOffice Developers Hosting User Interface Design Competition

  Submitted by Moochman KDE 19 Comments
"KOffice development is currently going on at a tremendous pace. Version 1.5, with Open Document as the default file format, will be released in March 2006 , and it is time to start collecting ideas for version 2. KOffice has received a donation of $1000 to be used as the prize in a GUI and Functionality Design competition. So whip out the RAD tools and your imagination and design the next big thing in office automation! Submissions to the competition should be GUI mockups accompanied with a written description of the intended workflow with ideas for the design of KOffice 2. See the KOffice 2 competition page for an example of how this could be done."
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MS Confirms WMF Flaw, Variants Spread

Windows 80 Comments
Microsoft acknowledged late Wednesday the existence of a zero-day exploit for Windows Metafile images, and said it was looking into ways to better protect its customers. Even worse, by the end of the day nearly 50 variants of the exploit had already appeared. One security company said the possibilities were endless on how the flaw could be exploited. 'This vulnerability can be used to install any type of malicious code, not just Trojans and spyware, but also worms, bots or viruses that can cause irreparable damage to computers,' said Luis Corrons of Panda Software.
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Seamonkey Beta Improves on Mozilla Legacy

Mozilla, Gecko 27 Comments
"SeaMonkey is the successor of the Mozilla Suite, described as 'a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as Mozilla Application Suite'. And it's finally got a brand new logo, one that supposedly represents a SeaMonkey but actually ended up looking like a blue bird, at least to my untrained eye." In addition, Camino 1.0b2 has been released.
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DRM Hell

  Submitted by Andrew Bragdon Privacy, Security 55 Comments
BentUser takes a look at OS-level DRM in upcoming operating systems, particularly Windows Vista. Protected video path, PVP-UAB and PVP-OPM, have the potential to be really obnoxious, eclipsing any annoyances one experiences with current DRM technologies.
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Think You Can Guess the Vista Launch Date?

Windows 38 Comments
MS is holding a contest in Europe & Pakistan, in which you have to guess what date MS will launch their long awaited next version of Windows. All legal residents of Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK who are 18 years of age or older have the chance to win from 1 of 3 prizes available in different prize bands; 1st Prize: Be live at the Launch Event in the USA: the full package with entry, flight and 3 nights in a 4-star Hotel, 2nd-4th Prize: New XBOX 360, 5th-10th Prize: XBOX Core System. NOTE: It seems to require IE to sign up, as it doesnt work in Safari, it may work in FF however.
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RISC OS Predictions for 2006

  Submitted by Peter Naulls RISC OS 12 Comments
Peter Naulls, the RISC OS developer behind, among other things, the Firefox port for RISC OS, has published a list of things that are likely, or less-likely, to happen in the world of RISC OS in 2006. "I'll suggest some projects that are both plausible and possible in a relatively short space of time. Whether they will be carried out is another matter entirely, and nothing should be read into these that I or anyone else intends to carry them out. One prediction I will make right now is that I expect developer support to continue to wane in 2006, with an increasingly frustrating general RISC OS situation, which for the first time in a long time, has only a little to do with technical restrictions."
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Linux Distributed Command Execution

  Submitted by anonymous Linux 17 Comments
"Many times, you want to execute a command not only on one server, but also on several servers. With the help of tool called tentakel, you run distributed command execution. It is a program for executing the same command on many hosts in parallel using ssh (it supports other methods too)."
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